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I recently spent a week replacing all Makefiles in a reasonably complex embedded arm project I maintain with apenwarr's redo [1] (revamping our cobbled-together

by csirac2 11y ago

I recently spent a week replacing all Makefiles in a reasonably complex embedded arm project I maintain with apenwarr's redo [1] (revamping our cobbled-together CI).. Which allows recursive make structured .do files, without tbe downsides - global dependencies and build state is cached across invocations in a throw-away .redo directory. It's an absolute joy to be able to stamp things that aren't files (eg docker containers) and just use one syntax (script of your choice) to orchestrate builds. Cross-compiled kernel, bootloader, custom packages, full distro rootfs to final sdcard image without a single Makefile. I owe that man a beer. [1] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo https://github.com/apenwarr/redo

brobdingnagian 11y ago
This is an interesting anecdote, but we wouldn't really expect you to waste a week doing something pointless like this and then tell us it wasn't awesome. You'd experience cognitive dissonance, so in order to avoid the dissonance of admitting that that redo is not really much better than make (if at all) you are just singing its praises.
- yoklov 11y ago
  Really? I frequently hear people spend time on projects and have the outcome be 'fuck that, never again' or similar. I don't think that's uncommon, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
- csirac2 11y ago
  I spent a week pulling apart our old build scripts (which were dysfunctional) and putting it all back together again with something new. I'd have done almost the same amount of work if I had stuck with make. In fact I spent two days doing just that prior to my redo adventure: I gave redo a whole day, and found I'd achieved a lot very quickly despite never having used it before. So I completed my spring cleaning with redo. Edit: I'm not singing redo's praises because I think the world should stop using make; fundamentally redo has potential scaling issues for very large codebases, but for the other 99.9% of projects if you want to explore an alternative, you could do much worse than djb redo.

by csirac2 11y ago

brobdingnagian 11y ago

This is an interesting anecdote, but we wouldn't really expect you to waste a week doing something pointless like this and then tell us it wasn't awesome. You'd experience cognitive dissonance, so in order to avoid the dissonance of admitting that that redo is not really much better than make (if at all) you are just singing its praises.

yoklov 11y ago
Really? I frequently hear people spend time on projects and have the outcome be 'fuck that, never again' or similar. I don't think that's uncommon, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
csirac2 11y ago
I spent a week pulling apart our old build scripts (which were dysfunctional) and putting it all back together again with something new. I'd have done almost the same amount of work if I had stuck with make. In fact I spent two days doing just that prior to my redo adventure: I gave redo a whole day, and found I'd achieved a lot very quickly despite never having used it before. So I completed my spring cleaning with redo. Edit: I'm not singing redo's praises because I think the world should stop using make; fundamentally redo has potential scaling issues for very large codebases, but for the other 99.9% of projects if you want to explore an alternative, you could do much worse than djb redo.